Another fruitful year goes by and we usher in this New Year wishing health, happiness, and success to everyone! We are happy to present our first newsletter of the year! In this issue, we share details on booting up our SBC running Linux entirely from an SD card. Continuing our trust with digital content protection which we had illustrated elaborately through Widevine DRM in our previous newsletter, we now provide a technical article on securing the boot process on our platforms. We hope you enjoy reading our content as much as we love creating it!

Boot Linux OS entirely from a SD card, without modifying the existing eMMC content, on Inforce platforms based on Snapdragon™ 410E

Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ processors provide external memory interfaces either through Secure Digital Controller lines or through UFS lines. Snapdragon based platforms are typically capable of running either Android or Linux based software and OEMs/Product creators would want to switch between these software flavors seamlessly in their development phase. It is thus desirable to devise mechanisms to create a fully bootable image from an external memory source such an SD card that could be plugged-out from one system and plugged-in to another system! Read more>>

Qualcomm® Secure boot Prevents malicious software from loading during the system start-up process of Inforce platforms

Hackers keep devising unique new ways to circumvent traditional anti-virus/anti-malware software but with a secure boot process, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to gain malicious entry into a system. The bootloader is the first code that is executed after the board is powered up. The bootloader performs initialization of low-level hardware like clocks, memory, communication etc and is therefore highly coupled with the hardware. A boot process is considered vulnerable when bootloader attacks use the boot process itself to load malicious code masquerading as a legitimate operating system, prior to the loading of the real OS. Read more>>